GET A ROPE Group Show

“Curator Kathy Grayson brings a Downtown NYC insider’s perspective to CTRL with a show comprising many of that scene’s luminaries, some of whom also have a personal connection to Houston. Patrick Griffin grew up in Houston, and met Dash Snow here, a teenager in exile from misdeeds in Manhattan. Dash’s grandmother, Christophe de Menil is the reigning doyenne of the Houston art world. Terence and Slava are titillated by Texas”.

Beyond their social lives, what connects these artists is a direct, down-and-dirty style unencumbered by the stereotypical New Yorker’s urbane subtlety. Aurel Schmidt makes meticulous trompe-l’oeil drawings of dissolute, strung-out monsters emerging from arrangements of cigarette butts, flies, maggots, condoms, birds, snakes, cobwebs and the like. Dash Snow’s photographs are romantic, repulsive and lucid documents of the downtown scene he helped to start. Slava Mogutin takes tender and dirty pictures of boxers, strippers and fetishists: bathroom-stall love poems. Patrick Griffin’s painted re-creations of old thrift-store buttons are too gritty to be slick and too sincere to be pop. Impresario Aaron ‘A-Ron’ Bondaroff, whose lifestyle has been his job since the age of fifteen, has literally made his life a style, publishing his complete autobiography on a series of T- shirts. Terence Koh’s celebrated practice conjures a stark and seamy opulence that runs roughshod over distinctions of class, taste, genre and gender. Xu Han Wei, yin to Terence’s yang, is a more mysterious but equally versatile talent”.

Several of the artists will be traveling to Houston to make site-specific pieces, to come home or to gawk. A zine documenting the exhibition and the surrounding shenanigans will be available”.

GET A ROPE
curated by Kathy Grayson
at CTRL on Friday, February 27 through to April 18.

About the AuthorGreg Weinstein

In 1999, Greg launched Island Def Jam’s new media division, working with the record label to build the kind of Internet and social media infrastructure that every entertainment and media company takes for granted today. From there he brought his new media expertise and entertainment connections to the world of streetwear, serving as Marketing Director at Karmaloop and launching KarmaloopTV, a cutting edge project that bridged the gap between commerce and culture.
Thrillist Media Group then brought Greg to help grow the company’s presence in the world of cultural taste-making through the launch of its streetwear property, The Crosby Press.
Today, Greg serves as creative director at SlamXHype, one the most well-respected online publications in the streetwear space. Under his guidance, SlamXHype has experienced a renaissance in both influence and readership.